“No one is asking Zelenskyy to recognize Crimea as Russian territory!” - Donald Trump insists in his latest post on the social network Truth, dedicated entirely to the Ukrainian president. But it is Zelenskyy's words that Ukraine will never recognize Russia's annexation of Crimea that are causing this crazy mix of blame and praise, and the breakdown of the talks in London. The Americans had relied on them to the last, but - having received no signal that the Europeans would help make a Kyiv-style cutlet out of the Ukrainian delegation, and worse, having received the opposite signal - Secretary of State Marco Rubio withdrew from the meeting less than a day before it was to take place and was left to with papers on his side of the ocean. Keith Kellogg is sent to the UK to deliver the American message, and he is likely to be given up on soon. After all, when in a week every sane media outlet in the United States tells us that Trump failed to stop the war between Russia and Ukraine in a day or a hundred days, someone in his team (primarily himself) will have to be made a scapegoat. 

“I have nothing to do with Russia”, Donald Trump said in the same post, so perhaps Steve Witkoff was exaggerating artistically (for the sake of the negotiation process) when he said that the president liked the portrait, which was painted by Nikas Safronov on Putin's request. "Trump's flattering portrait is an important step in improving relations between Russia and the United States," the Kremlin leader allegedly told him. But Trump himself was exaggerating artistically (for the sake of the negotiation process) when he wrote earlier about the "big business" that America is about to do with Russia when Ukraine finally signs a peace agreement, an honest peace agreement, Vice President J.D. Vance added from India, where everyone will have to give up some territory. Trump's entire previous presidential term was spent trying to prove that nothing, absolutely nothing, ties him to Russia. Starting with the fact that American intelligence agencies accused the Kremlin of interfering in the election, not so much as to cast doubt on the results, but still in Trump's favor. His chief political strategist, Paul Manafort (coincidentally, also one of the political strategists of the Party of Regions, recommended by Russian oligarch Deripaska), was sent to prison after a high-profile trial. Trump himself, according to Washington Times journalist Bob Woodward in his latest book, spoke with Putin at least seven times after he left the White House, having lost the election to Joe Biden. "If I did it, I did it wisely," Trump himself said after the book's publication, "If you're friends with people, if you have relationships with people, it's good, not bad in a state sense. Some thirty years ago, when the master dealmaker was in multiple bankruptcies and American banks were shying away from him, Trump managed to get by thanks to foreign capital of post-Soviet origin. Money flowed into American accounts through new real estate partnerships and the purchase of numerous Trump condominiums, and it was the Bayrock Group helping Trump, run by a former Soviet official, Tofik Arifov of Kazakh origin. Another of its co-chairmen is Felix Seiter (aka Sheferovsky), a man of an interesting background and connections with ties to the Russian mafia. Even Trump's son joked in 2008, when there were no talks about the presidential election: "...the Russians make up a very disproportionate share of many of our assets. (...) We see a lot of money flowing out of Russia." The investigation found that during Trump's first presidential campaign, at least 14 Russians tried to contact his inner circle - his closest advisers and children - in an attempt to get in touch with him. However, Special Counsel Mueller's 2-year investigation into Trump's potential conscious collusion with the Kremlin did not find any hard evidence of the US president's work for the Russian government. But it has obviously left a noticeable enough mark in Trump's mind to continue to justify himself now, 6 years later. After all, there really were ties, and quite possibly they still exist. At least, this is the easiest way to explain why, half a day after the Kremlin spokesman says "negotiations cannot be publicized and must be conducted in silence," the White House spokeswoman irritably repeats the same thesis, accusing Zelenskyy of revealing too much to the public.

“Zelenskyy is preventing the war from ending”, Donald Trump argues, and this is partly true if you want to end the war the way the 47th American president wants to do it, that is, to fulfill all Russian conditions so that Putin can declare victory on his internal Russian victory day in the war cannibalized by Russian propaganda. But Zelenskyy has not always articulated the issue of Crimea so clearly. Back in March 2022, his negotiation team, led by Arakhamia, proposed in Istanbul to "hold bilateral negotiations on the status of Crimea and Sevastopol for 15 years." "As a separate point," Arakhamia added, "we propose to the Russian Federation that Ukraine and Russia will not use military force to resolve the issue of Crimea during this time, while negotiations are underway. Following him, Oleksandr Chaly (it is still unclear how the person who took an odious proposal to the Munich Security Conference in 2020 to develop a new Ukrainian identity, taking into account Russia's views on history, language, and national memory, ended up on the negotiating team) said that Ukraine would be fine without NATO, with bilateral security guarantees. Both the United States (then still the United States of a sane man) and the United Kingdom immediately made it clear: no, these talks do not show that Russia is ready for a lasting peace. It is still unknown what conversations with the Ukrainians about this took place off-camera. No one had any more direct talks with the Kremlin because the Russians were pushed back from the Kyiv region, and the world shuddered. Now J.D. Vance is following the Russians in calling foreign leaders' trips "propaganda tours," and Trump officials are scaling back joint U.S.-Ukrainian programs to investigate Russia's war crimes. Because this information is not just unnecessary. It categorically prevents us from ending the war. And Zelenskyy has been squeezed into a clear negotiation framework by the same great disgust with his predecessor as with Trump himself. "Minsk is the worst thing that can happen, and we should never return to it - a frozen conflict," the sixth president of Ukraine said last fall, speaking at an Italian forum. At the same time, a British military analyst and former military pilot, Sean Bell, told me: You have some tough decisions ahead of you. But for Zelenskyy, making tough decisions de facto means recognizing that the Minsk agreements signed by Ukraine's fifth president were not the best, but the only possible option at the time for dealing with a disproportionately larger enemy under the watchful eye of European allies who were eager to freeze the conflict and continue to consume cheap Russian gas. Soon, he risks finding himself in a much worse position than Poroshenko. And so do we all, along with him. Just three months ago, any internal discussion could have been put to rest with the words: the only one to blame is Russia. Now America is going to share responsibility with Russia. Shortly, you will see a lot of predictions about what will not happen in Ukraine if the United States stops aid for the third but last time. And then they will ban the supply of weapons with American parts to Ukraine. In history classes in fifty years, this decision may be described as short-sighted and pathetic as the Munich Agreement... but for that, someone else needs to have relevant history lessons in Ukrainian in fifty years. 

"I don't know of any countries where, in the fourth year of the war, you could go to any supermarket and see as many offers as in Ukraine," says the chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, Ruslan Stefanchuk, and he credits the Verkhovna Rada, the president, and the government with this state of affairs. This is dangerous populism: the solvency of Ukrainians has been maintained for four years on enormous (in terms of the Ukrainian budget) foreign revenues. If they stop or decrease significantly, there will be no need for daily Russian strikes, so electricity and water in large cities will be provided for several hours a day. With the United States having elected Donald Trump for the second time and not yet seeming disappointed with their choice, and the European Union (even if we forget about numerous internal problems, the steady rise of populists in power, and Orban) taking years to implement the decision to reduce its dependence on American security guarantees, which now guarantee nothing, Ukraine risks many difficult years of external and internal struggle for its existence. Every unjustly ended war (and this war will end justly only by a miracle) is followed by a period of apathy and resentment in society, which in our case will be used. Boasting about the fact that the state is at war and continues to live comfortably is not the best way to prepare citizens for what is likely to happen next, although it is quite within the framework of the global political trend of feeding the people what they like to hear. Not that we need to get used to it, but under martial law, it is as much a luxury as the cars made last year outside Kyiv's Goodwine. Trump at the helm of the United States could lead to a global crisis or financial difficulties at home, but the history of the American economy is rich in financial difficulties. Ukraine as a state will not survive its analog in Ukraine.